It goes without saying – smartphones have started to own a huge part of our lives, well, almost all of it! The growing usage of smartphones has boosted our dependence on the mobile apps for even the littlest things.
You want to call a cab, order food, order grocery, book movie tickets, send flowers to someone, read a book, or even play a musical instrument – there is a mobile app for it all! So, with such a huge demand, the number of mobile apps just went out of hand.

The count goes to 2.8 million at the Google Play Store and 2.2 million at the App Store. Yes! That’s the behemoth number of apps!

The crowd of apps has grown so rapidly that the app stores are flooding with mobile apps. Therefore, for those who are in the process of creating their own mobile app need to be really unique, specific, and smart!

How can your mobile app be unique?

To stand out from the crowd, you have to be somewhat unique and the same goes for your mobile app. No matter what the idea behind your mobile app is, to make it unique and famous on the app stores, you need to work a lot on it. And a lot means a lot!

So, why not work on the User Interface?

Remember – the mobile users are bombarded with a fusillade of new apps in the app store, almost every day. Thus, they won’t even bother with your mobile app if it offers a bad UI.

Paying heed to the UI design of your mobile app is a must in today’s digital time. Without a great UI, you cannot win the audience for your mobile app. Here is a list of some UI design principles that you must follow:

1) The Principle of Design

While you’re designing your app, pay a close heed to the structure of your app. The structure of your app includes everything that you’re putting into it. The elements visible on the screen, screen resolution, color scheme, menu type, fonts, sound, and what not! Everything comes under the design of your mobile app.

Paying a close heed to these elements with your audience in mind can help you deliver the best UI design. For instance, if you’re creating a corporate app, you can use subtle color schemes with a more formal set of fonts. On the other hand, if you’re making a reading or picture book app for kids, things need to be all colorful and cursive!

2) The Principle of Simplicity

What kills your mobile app’s UI is complicated designs and layouts. Always keep the layout of your mobile app simple. Don’t leave it to your users to learn a lot as they will eventually lose interest.

You can create a minimalist design that is aesthetically appealing to your audience. Consider it in this way – the more information you add to your app’s menu or dialogue boxes, the lesser attention will be paid to it. Thus, your users will end up abandoning your app!

• Reduce learning within the app and eliminate all sorts of confusion that might irk up the users

• Use a simple layout with a minimal background and color scheme so that nothing seems too loud within the app

• Don’t litter your screen with too many pop-ups or ads and let the users focus

• Avoid adding complicated controls to the app, let it be easy and simple for the user to control the app

• Add some useful shortcuts for an ease of use

3) The Principle of Performance

In the end, what matters is the performance of your mobile app. If your user is happy with the performance of your app, he can keep everything else aside for a while. This is because every user wants an app that performs well.

Now, the performance of your app is a mix of a number of things like – the app’s display, the content, navigation, load time, etc. If your app manages to score well on all these factors, you can rest assured that your app is going to perform quite well!

And with better performance, you can deliver a good UI to your users.

4) The Principle of Convention

For delivering the best app UI design, consistency is a must. By changing the functioning of similar buttons, the controls of similar actions, and the words for similar commands might leave your users confused. So, keep your UI consistent.

• Keep user actions and controls consistent. For instance, if the user is able to double tap a menu for a particular action, he must be able to do the same for a similar menu in the next screen or tab of the app.

• Keep words of command consistent. If a command says ‘resume’ in one part of the app, it must say ‘resume’ in all the other parts. By using some other words like ‘continue’, you will lose the consistency of your mobile app and it shows a great UI design loophole.

All these principles, when followed together, help you deliver the best UI design for your mobile app. UI design has gained a great importance these days and any mobile app with a bad UI design isn’t allowed to live longer in the app stores. It’s usually abandoned by the users.

If you don’t want something like that to happen to your mobile app, you must pay a close attention towards delivering the best UI to your app users. So, start working on it today and launch your masterpiece with a promising UI design!

About the Author

A very zealous lead mobile app developer at SoftProdigy, Anirudh works his way through a diverse experience in the niche of android and iOS development. As a technical lead, Anirudh is the front-runner for all the development activities performed by SoftProdigy’s mobile app development team.
He possesses matchless expertise in Corona, PhoneGap, JQuery, Xamarin, Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, IoT, Objective-C, Swift and other SDKs with a high-end understanding of the mobile ecosystem.

It goes without saying – smartphones have started to own a huge part of our lives, well, almost all of it! The growing usage of smartphones has boosted our dependence on the mobile apps for even the littlest things. You want to call a cab, order fo...